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Resource competition and coexistence in heterogeneous metacommunities: many-species coexistence is unlikely to be facilitated by spatial variation in resources.

ABSTRACT: There is little debate about the potential of environmental heterogeneity to facilitate species diversity. However, attempts to show the relationship between spatial heterogeneity and diversity empirically have given mixed results. One reason for this may be the failure to consider how species respond to the factor in the environment that varies. Most models of the heterogeneity-diversity relationship assume heterogeneity in non-resource environmental factors. These models show the potential for spatial heterogeneity to promote many-species coexistence via mainly the spatial storage effect. Here, I present a model of species competition under spatial heterogeneity and resource factors. This model allows for the stable coexistence of only two species. Partitioning the model to quantify the contributions of variation-dependent coexistence mechanisms shows contributions from only one mechanism, growth-density covariance. More notably, it shows the lack of potential for any contribution from the spatial storage effect, the only mechanism that can facilitate stable many-species coexistence. This happens because the spatial storage effect measures the contribution of different species to specializing on different parts of the gradient of the heterogeneous factor. Under simple models of resource competition, in which all species grow best at high resource levels, such specialization is impossible. This analysis suggests that, in the absence of additional mechanisms, spatial heterogeneity in a single resource is unlikely to facilitate many-species coexistence and, more generally, that when evaluating the relationship between heterogeneity and diversity, a distinction should be made between resource and non-resource factors.

SUBMITTER: Schoolmaster DR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3757524 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Resource competition and coexistence in heterogeneous metacommunities: many-species coexistence is unlikely to be facilitated by spatial variation in resources.

Schoolmaster Donald R DR

PeerJ 20130822

There is little debate about the potential of environmental heterogeneity to facilitate species diversity. However, attempts to show the relationship between spatial heterogeneity and diversity empirically have given mixed results. One reason for this may be the failure to consider how species respond to the factor in the environment that varies. Most models of the heterogeneity-diversity relationship assume heterogeneity in non-resource environmental factors. These models show the potential for ...[more]

PMID: 24010016

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Project description:One of the main goals of community ecology is to measure the relative importance of environmental filters to understand patterns of species distribution at different temporal and spatial scales. Likewise, the identification of factors that shape symbiont metacommunity structures is important in disease ecology because resulting structures drive disease transmission. We tested the hypothesis that distributions of virus species and viral families from rodents and bats are defined by shared responses to host phylogeny and host functional characteristics, shaping the viral metacommunity structures at four spatial scales (Continental, Biogeographical, Zoogeographical, and Regional). The contribution of host phylogeny and host traits to the metacommunity of viruses at each spatial scale was calculated using a redundant analysis of canonical ordering (RDA). For rodents, at American Continental scale the coherence of viral species metacommunity increased while the spatial scale decreased and Quasi-Clementsian structures were observed. This pattern suggests a restricted distribution of viruses through their hosts, while in the Big Mass (Europe, Africa, and Asia), the coherence decreased as spatial scale decreased. Viral species metacommunities associated with bats was dominated by random structures along all spatial scales. We suggest that this random pattern is a result of the presence of viruses with high occupancy range such as rabies (73%) and coronavirus (27%), that disrupt such structures. At viral family scale, viral metacommunities associated with bats showed coherent structures, with the emergence of Quasi- Clementsian and Checkerboard structures. RDA analysis indicates that the assemblage of viral diversity associated with rodents and bats responds to phylogenetic and functional characteristics, which alternate between spatial scales. Several of these variations could be subject to the spatial scale, in spite of this, we could identify patterns at macro ecological scale. The application of metacommunity theory at symbiont scales is particularly useful for large-scale ecological analysis. Understanding the rules of host-virus association can be useful to take better decisions in epidemiological surveillance, control and even predictions of viral distribution and dissemination.Electronic supplementary materialSupplementary material is available for this article at 10.1556/168.2018.19.2.9 and is accessible for authorized users.

Dataset Information

Resource competition and coexistence in heterogeneous metacommunities: many-species coexistence is unlikely to be facilitated by spatial variation in resources.

Publications

Resource competition and coexistence in heterogeneous metacommunities: many-species coexistence is unlikely to be facilitated by spatial variation in resources.

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